The diffusion of racist violence in the Netherlands: Discourse and distance

Abstract

This article illuminates the unanticipated but intense waves of xenophobia that have swept through Western Europe over the last decade. The author makes use of a unique dataset and diffusion models to simultaneously investigate the geographical and temporal development of waves of racist violence in the Netherlands during the turbulent period 2001–03, when the country lost its reputation as a multicultural paradise. The results provide evidence for the fact that previous riots enhance the legitimacy of violence elsewhere, especially if they are visible in the mass media, resonate with public debates on immigration and take place in nearby regions. Opposing previous research on mobilization, the analysis suggests that proxies for ethnic competition, deprivation and political opportunity structures are not significantly related to the outbreak of violence; only population size adequately predicts where violence starts. Together these findings suggest that waves of xenophobia develop in two steps: they start in large cities and subsequently spread to nearby places through geographically clustered networks and to more distant counties once they become visible and resonate in the mass media, turning violence from local deviance into a supra-local phenomenon. This process sheds light on how scales of protest shift and explains why seemingly tolerant regions can suddenly become xenophobic hotbeds.

Diffusion in Referendum Campaigns: The Case of EU Constitutional Referendums

“…Ovodenko et al, 2012;Stone, 2004;Weyland, 2005). Similarly, the mass media coverage is important in exchanging information from one government to another (Braun, 2011;Dolowitz, 1997).…”

The Diffusion of Exclusion: Medieval Expulsions of Jews

“…adapted a measure common in the sociology of diffusion (Andrews and Biggs 2006;Braun 2011;Hedström 1994) to account for categorical differences in power and status. By combining classification with distance, I can distinguish the importance of a particular group of cities for how others behaved.…”

“…I calculated least-cost paths along transit routes between all cities. Following Braun (2011) and Hedström (1994), for each year I summed the distances to expulsions Dij, then took the square root. I inverted this and multiplied by the number of expulsions, after which I summed in ten-year moving windows.…”

Radical right-wing movements: Who, when, how and why?

“…Likewise, theories on diffusion and social contagion stress the importance of cognitive elements for the spread of right-wing radical mobilization (Braun, 2011;Jäckle and König, 2016;Koopmans and Olzak, 2004;Muis, 2015). On the basis of a longitudinal and cross-country study (on five European democracies), Koopmans et al (2005) found that the mobilization and success of radical right-wing actors are strongly affected by the cultural and historical policies of the country (i.e.…”